Distracted driving: Change a font, save a life

Share This article

Here’s a partial cure for distracted driving: Improve the typefaces on cockpit displays. Careful selection of readable display fonts means a driver can scan displays quickly, understand what they say at a glance, make the right selection, and get his eyes back on the road. Research done by by MIT found so-called humanist family fonts easier to read than grotesque family fonts. The humanist letterforms are more open, with increased inter-character spacing, and characters are unambiguous in their forms and proportions. In a series of experiments, men spent 11% less time glancing at a humanist than grotesque display before returning their eyes to the road. At highway speeds, that’s a savings of 50 or so feet. For women, there was a modest difference and as for why they fared differently than men, MIT’s researchers say it falls into the realm of we-just-don’t-know. Federal guidelines suggest drivers should glance at displays for no more than 1.5 seconds (132 feet traveled at 60 mph) and auto industry guidelines suggest no more than 2 seconds, so savings of even a few tenths of a second are important for both auto safety and staying on the good side of the feds.

MIT ran the study for Monotype International, a typeface company that sells — surprise — humanist fonts such as Frutiger (pictured above), which was used in the test. (Monotype actually makes all types of fonts.) In a test of “glance times,” the key finding was that men performing tasks reading and selecting choices from a dashtop portable display, completed the tasks and had their eyes back on the road 10.6% faster when reading Monotype’s Frutiger (humanist) font than reading the Eurostile (a so-called grotesque) font. For women, the improvement in glance time going from grotesque to humanist was only fractionally improved, less than 2%. Both men and women made 3.1% fewer menu selection errors with the humanist font. Monotype also says carefully designed commercial humanist fonts (that you pay for) may be more readable than lookalike fonts freely available online (that you don’t).

If you want to see for yourself, on a PC that has Microsoft Office or Publisher installed, you’re likely to find your PC loaded with Eurostile, the grotesque font used in the MIT study, and Corbel, a humanist font similar to Frutiger. Notice how Eurostile is blocky. At a glance, Eurostile’s C-D-O-0 (capital oh and zero) seem somehat alike. With Corbel here, or Frutiger, the C is more open so it’s not like D, and capital 0 and zero are different sizes and widths. In their study, An Evaluation of Typeface Design in a Text-Rich Automotive User Interface [PDF], three members of MITs AgeLab, Bryan Reimer, Bruce Mehler, and Joseph Coughlin, tested how much better a humanist font might be. (Although the lab’s name suggests old people, subjects were in their 30s to 70s.)

The MIT report says the smaller test differences shown by women from grotesque to humanist were “novel and were unexpected …. this does raise the question as to whether there might be other visual acuity or perceptual differences associated with gender” that led to the results the researchers got. Not surprisingly, the researchers suggested more research is needed.

According to MIT’s Reimer, typographers believe humanist fonts with strongly differentiated form groups (that is, the number 0 doens’t look like a capital O) have an advantage in quick-glance situations such as reading a car’s LCD display than geometric sans-serif faces (such as Century Gothic), grotesque sans-serifs (Arial, Helvetica), and square grotesque sans-serifs (Eurostile). “Grotesque” is a common typographic term that connotes “different” more than “bizarre” or “weird.” The MIT group chose Eurostile as a comparison baseline because it’s already used in some car displays.

Eurostile, as a font face, suggests high technology, the clean lines of modern architecture, or science fiction. You might associate it with the aura of a Droid phone (which actually has its own fonts). “Eurostile is actually very popular in automotive today — it conveys power and energy,” says Steve Matteson, creative type director at Monotype and part of the research team. “However, the letterforms are mechanically rigid and compact, tightly spaced, and in some cases are nearly indistinguishable from each other.”

According to Monotype, “Humanist typefaces such as the Frutiger design … are characterized by open forms that lead the eye horizontally, making them ideal for reading small text. Humanist styles are noted for their highly distinguishable shapes, which help to lessen at-a-glance ambiguity.”

The test was run on a 7-inch LCD display with 800×480 resolution, effectively a largish portable GPS system that might be in a big SUV or truck. The fonts were fixed at 4mm high or about 15 points, says Monotype. The test setting was a stationary Volkswagen New Beetle with a projected road surface in front and a pair of eye-tracking cameras on the dash, perfectly adequate for testing, MIT says, if not quite as impressive as the 360-degrees-of-video Ford Virttex simulator. They timed how long the driver spent performing tasks (picking an address, a restaurant name, and content from lists), how quickly they got their eyes back on the road, and how many errors they made. Men were noticeably improved working from Frutiger menus, with a reduction in glance time of 12.2% in one study and by 9.1% in a second study with reduced contrast displays (average 10.6%). Men and women made errors 3.1% less often picking from humanist-font lists. While the lack of difference by females on some other tasks surprised the testers, it wasn’t that the women performed worse than men; on some tests they were better.

Tagged In

Post a Comment

Alan Barker

They should have tested serif v sanserif fonts also.

http://twitter.com/billhoward Bill Howard

Alan, thanks for your note. Serif fonts such as Times New Roman (ugh) or Bookman (much better) have already been tested and been found less at-a-glance legible. What makes for a good magazine or book font doesn’t work so well on digital displays, or where you only want to convey a few words of information quickly. The same goes for road signs. I have a picture of me in an olde towne in eastern Germany under the entering-the-town-of sign, and if any town would have a serifed sign (i.e. Olde English), it would be this one, marked “Frankenstein.” Nope, it’s just the usual highway Helvetica common in Europe.

The MIT people pointed out that they wanted to build on the large body of work already out there and not retest every thing again. There is still plenty to do. For instance, testing what fonts work for people with imperfect vision, especially those who’re supposed to be wearing reading glasses and aren’t.

Alan Barker

Kerning is also very important, and probably has a large effect on “at-a-glance” comprehension. Spacing probably also has a large effect. I would not have expected a serif font to be as readable as a sanserif font in this application, but you do the tests to find the unexpected. Sanserif fonts are generally better for small blocks of text.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_EKNZKJ5LBTYYEUH4NCSPTGFGGE Eric

I will go out on a limb here…

How about MOST (but not all) women read with the emotional side of their brain and then translate to the analytical side, which is why they are better with poetry than most men.

Most men (but not all) use the analytical side of their brain first, which doesn’t have to cross sides to make sense.

I could be wrong, but my experiences as a passenger with both male and female drivers over 40 years has lead me to this conclusion.

Feel free to disagree.

It does not make men or women better than each other overall, but there are many things that a man can in general do better than most women, and things a woman can do better than most men…

At least the humanist fonts DID make an improvement for both sexes, that is what is really important here.

Anyone else pay attention to male and female drivers over the years and notice the differences in how they handle complex routes in town or long distance drives?

Please do share your experiences…

David Baron

A very important study and yes, more must be done!

Obvious: (Somewhat) Easier to read and newspaper with serif fonts than sans-serif but most computer software seems to default to sans serif because they look cleaner, easier to draw well. From the looks of what I am typing now, this is a “humanist” font, but what you see may differ. Few would tolerate even a short article with the type of fonts used for wedding invitations. Readability, quickness, pleasantness (why add stress while driving or programming?), all are obviously important, too frequently overlooked. Typography is indeed an art but form must serve function, at least in certain critical cases.

Vincent Diep

I prefer sans-serif fonts for everything, including print material. Serif fonts just seem less readable on a newspaper or a book, especially when italicized. Of course there’s exceptions (such as Comic Sans MS, which was used to print my entire chemistry lab manual in first-year university), but for the most part I find legibility and pleasantness lie with sans-serif fonts. Times New Roman is definitely one font that I don’t like, the only Serif font that is acceptable for me would be Constantia.

http://www.facebook.com/john.citron.3 John Citron

In the past I worked as a typesetter and then a desktop publisher so I found this article to be extremely interesting. I’ve used many, many fonts including those impossible to read fancy script fonts all the way down to simple-to-read Futura and Helvetica.

I have noticed with LCD displays that the size of the font matters. The font, no matter who makes it, appear darker when the point-size is increased. This is probably due to the increased number of pixels used to display each character making them appear darker. The slightly embolden font is much easier to read against the white background.

Letter spacing or kerning can help too. With upper and lowercase characters tucked in under their cap neighbors, this can make discerning words much faster. There’s nothing worse then seeing something like this: W elcome, or H elp! When reading quickly, the eye doesn’t always decode this easily. The brain has to put everything back together and process the whole word. In a situation, such as the one described here, those extra seconds can make the difference.

Anyway I’m going to share this great article with my graphic artist friends and see what they have to say.

PRO Visual Arts

Although discussion here has limited itself to ‘humanist’ vs ‘gothic’ typefaces, these researchers have only begun to scratch the surface. Typographers, those with extensive study, research and experience should be more thoroughly tapped for their expertise. The differences in legibility and ‘information uptake’ are critical to this discussion.
One of the singlebest case studies of the past century can and should be studied in depth; that of the signage and wayfinding system developed specifically for the Charles De Gaulle Airport, at Roissy, France*.
The typographer, Adrian Frutiger, developed the eponymously titled font “Frutiger” specifically for this project. This enormous project takes into consideration rapid legibility at highway speeds for road signage, as well as the more casual perception rates while walking, which are at times, perceived from acute angles. The complete signage and wayfinding systems designed in this project are uniquely solved in this single font family.

Interesting study, I actually prefer the aria and verdana fonts when it comes to reading. Arial is Neo-grotesque and verdana is humanist. I wonder what that means if anything. One thing we must not loose sight of in this discussion is that distracted driving is dangerous and my vote is to continue to improve the hand-held laws. Here is a list of states that still do not have distracted driving laws on the books: http://zautos.com/distracted-driving-infographic-dangers-of-distracted-driving/

We also need to continue to increase awareness.

Sparky Hansen

I want to know what the difference (in this article) is between “breaks” and “brakes”. Would you care to clear this up for me?

Mia Hart

What an interesting study. I would never have guessed that by changing the font of even my GPS could actually help save my own life. Thanks for the information. Definitely an interesting read.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.